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Jane Austen, romance novels, and a chihuahua

By Deborah Yaffe, Jan 25 2018 02:00PM

Jane Austen’s relationship to the romance novel is a vexed topic. For every article calling her the founding mother of the genre (or perhaps the grandmother, with a line of descent through Georgette Heyer), you’ll find just as many insisting that she is a social satirist who just happens to write about heterosexual romance.

My own romance-novel addiction is moderate-to-severe, and, appropriately enough, I developed it while researching Among the Janeites, which required me to read a boatload of Austen fanfic. Before long, I was branching out into non-Austen-inspired Regency romance, and then non-Regency historical romance, and then contemporary romance, and . . . now I have more than two hundred titles on my Kindle, not even counting the Austen spinoffs. (But really! I can stop anytime I want!)

Personally, I would not call Austen a romance novelist: Her stories never have the laser-like focus on the central relationship that is the hallmark of much modern-day romance writing, and she is more interested in recording her heroines’ moral development than in cataloguing the butterflies they feel when they accidentally brush fingertips with their heroes. It’s the Austen movies, with their dashing lead actors and swoony proposal scenes, that have convinced a generation of readers that Austen is a romance writer.

Still, I cannot deny that by making the question of who a young woman should marry into a central preoccupation of fiction, Austen planted a seed that has now flowered into arguably the most vibrant sector of American publishing. And so I was rather charmed by the latest news about The Ripped Bodice, an all-romance indie bookstore in Culver City, California, run by a pair of sisters.

One corner of the shop, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek, houses Fitz’s General Store, “devoted to merchandise—tote bags, calendars, candles—featuring their Chihuahua, Fitzwilliam Waffles (after Fitzwilliam Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice).” (The dog has his own Instagram account, too.)

It’s hard to object to people who: a) like romance novels, b) observe the Janeite tradition of naming pets after Austen characters, and c) have managed to channel the devotion to quasi-Janeite merchandise into a method of supporting independent bookselling. Plus, the dog is pretty cute.